Agriculture

Poverty and Neo-liberalism in IndiaUtsa Patnaik

January 8, 2007

This paper explores why the official poverty estimates show decline in poverty in India over the 1990s, whereas all other economic and social indicators suggest that absolute poverty is high. The former do not capture the true picture because the official method involves the ‘fallacy of equivocation’. It is also argued that when actual rural poverty is as high as nearly four-fifths of the population and poverty depth is increasing, there is an urgent need to revert to a demand-driven universal public distribution system.